Why YouTube Is Showing You Hours of Unskippable Ads

Google has been taking its crusade against adblockers to a whole new level lately, so if you’ve started getting unskippable multi-hour ads on YouTube, that might be why. Over the past week, Redditors have been sharing screenshots showing that they’ve been served ads with runtimes as long as three hours, with no skip button in sight—and that’s to watch videos that are much shorter than the ads themselves.

Android Authority was the first to report on the phenomenon, linking to threads from users Lin1ex and Standard-Slip6572, who complained about the feature-length interruptions, complete with images of their screens. The publication also pointed to commenters who made further claims, saying they were served 10-hour or even 90-hour ads, although these more extreme accusations lacked photo evidence.

If that all sounds a little unbelievable to you, you have good instincts. And in one of the linked photos above, you might see a small pop-up, separate from YouTube’s UI, that says “Skipping ads…”

This pop-up led Android Authority to question whether it’s only users running ad blockers who are getting this kind of treatment, a question author Aamir Siddiqui reached out to YouTube for confirmation on. While the company exactly admit to any specific punitive behavior for users employing adblockers, its answer does seem to hint at what’s going on, if you read between the lines.

“…the use of ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service,” Google’s statement reads. “We’ve launched a global effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience.”

By YouTube’s own admission, unskippable ads are supposed to be limited to 15-seconds, so something is definitely going on here, assuming the Redditors’ claims are true. While I myself have gotten hour-long ads before, a skip button has always appeared for them.

I’ve reached out to YouTube myself for further clarification, but in the meantime, it’s worth noting that the move does line up with the company’s recent behavior. Previously, the company has injected ads straight into videos so that ad blockers can’t detect them, as well as used pop-ups to block users with ad blockers from watching videos at all. Google Chrome as a whole has also started disabling certain ad-blockers, thanks to a controversial change to the API extension developers use.

If you notice an unskippable multi-hour ad on YouTube, try disabling your ad blocker to see if that fixes the issue. If it does, and this new change works like YouTube’s prior anti-ad-blocker rollouts, you might then want to try watching the video again in incognito mode to see if the measure is linked to your account—this should help you diagnose what’s going on so you can more easily know what to do next.